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A proposed change to how federal retirees' cost-of-living adjustments are calculated could have a huge, negative impact, according to David Snell of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association. NARFE is urging its members and retirees to contact their congressmen during the week of Sept. 16 to express their opposition to the chained consumer price index.

"but for people receiving veterans and Social Security benefits as well."
This needs to be explained in laymans terms, basically, I am getting screwed by Social Security?
If that is the case, why in the heck am I wasting my time working and paying into Social Security for? I might as well leave my job, and get paid under the table. At least I will be able to keep what I make rather then paying out the butt to those morons running this country, hey, if the illegals can live and work here for 5-10-15-20 years and not pay one dime to this country so can I. Worked 30+ years and for what? To get stepped on while those on welfare don't do crap and suck the system, at one time...working most of your life meant a good retirement. Now! I would have to work well into my 70's, who in the heck is going to hire a 70 year old for a job???? Tell me that????

The chained CPI will probably become law since Obama supports the idea, but until it does I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. However, one thing that has happened is no pay raise for three years. I've heard very little in terms of complaints from the federal unions on that one. Golly let a republican president freeze our pay for three years and the unions would go off the deep end. Maybe NARFE or NTEU should provide us with the cumulative impact of no pay raise for three years. We COULD lose tens of thousands under chained CPI, but we HAVE lost tens of thousands under the pay freeze.

We have more and more of our population qualifying for retirement, SS, and Medicare. This means the costs are going up as fast as the money going into the system is dropping. Even when those people are being replaced, it means that the person at the top of the pay table is consuming instead of contributing and they are replaced by someone at the bottom of the pay table who isn't contributing as much. The options are cutting benefits, raising eligibility ages or increasing the tax rate. With Medicare raising the age would just dump more people into Medicaid or a private insurance plan, so the amount saved wouldn't be so much. Raising the age would require some people to keep working longer, perhaps beyond what they are physically capable of. Reducing benefits has its obvious downsides as well and may lead people to working longer to increase savings. Increasing taxes would be at best a short term fix as projections indicate SS and Medicare costs could double for the remaining workers before the baby boomers finally start to pass on in any significant numbers. There are any number of potential solutions in there, likely taking a little from each pot to avoid causing undue harm to any one group at one time. Unfortunately, the political rhetoric and much of the press coverage (present company excepted) has not been helpful in finding a balanced solution. Chained CPI is likely going to be part of the final solution, if for no other reason than that it achieves the required function adequately and we have a system for calculating it.

SS and Federal retirement that this would affect is not entirely a loss to me because I expect to live long enough to collect more benefits than I contributed to the system. As such, even though I will not receive all that I could, I will still get more than I really paid into the system and should have any reasonable expectation of getting out. As I figure it, if I make it past somewhere between 75 and 80, I will be getting more than I gave anyway. Chained CPI just pushes that date back a bit. I would prefer this option to raising the eligibility age to 70 or higher, as I would like the extra cash while I could hopefully still enjoy it to some degree.